Dropshipping 101: Everything You Need to Start Selling Today

What Dropshipping Actually Is (and Is Not)

Dropshipping is a retail model where you sell products without holding inventory. When a customer places an order, you purchase the item from a supplier who ships directly to the customer. You never see or handle the product.

What dropshipping is not: a passive income scheme, a business with no work involved, or a model that works without attention to margin. The sellers who succeed treat it as a real business with real unit economics.

Step 1: Choose Your Niche

Before building anything, pick a product category with demand, manageable competition, and enough margin to absorb platform fees, shipping, and a 5–10% return rate. Use Google Trends to validate demand and browse marketplace best-seller lists to understand the competitive landscape.

Step 2: Find a Reliable Supplier

Where to Start

AliExpress and CJDropshipping are common starting points for global products. Alibaba is better for ordering from manufacturers directly at volume. For Turkish sellers targeting Trendyol, domestic suppliers often have better shipping times and return handling.

Vet Your Supplier

Order a sample of every product before listing it. Review the supplier's fulfilment speed, packaging quality, and communication response time. A supplier who takes 48 hours to respond to a sample inquiry will take longer when you have real orders and real customer complaints.

Step 3: Choose Your Platform

Your platform choice determines your fee structure, audience access, and operational complexity. Compare Shopify and Amazon (or Trendyol, Ozon, Wildberries for relevant markets) by running your product through DropCalc with realistic sale prices and costs. Pick the platform where the margin model makes sense before you build anything.

Step 4: Price Correctly From Day One

New dropshippers consistently under-price to compete on listings without understanding whether the margin supports long-term operation. The rule: your sale price must generate at least 20% net margin after all platform fees, shipping, ad costs, and a return allowance. Model this in DropCalc before you set your listing price.

Step 5: Launch With a Minimum Viable Ad Budget

Start with a small daily ad budget ($10–20/day) to gather data before scaling. The goal of the first two weeks is not profit — it is data on click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost-per-acquisition. Once you have a profitable cost-per-acquisition, scale the budget by no more than 20% per week.

Step 6: Track Everything

Save every calculation in DropCalc. Review your actual margins weekly against what you modelled. When real margins diverge from modelled margins, diagnose why — usually it is return rates higher than modelled, shipping costs creeping up, or platform fee changes.